The next question is: why did China give Tesla this unprecedented deal?

The answer I heard at the time was to get local suppliers and workforce up to Tesla standards.

It appears to have worked out for China quite nicely.

Catfish effect. Ensure local players just don't become welfare queen mooching subsidy and incentives from govt both local and national.

Well yeah, they used this playbook with Apple as well.

It's not a country - it's a collection of individual billionaires. Each billionaire involved in these kinds of deals gets richer, and has no reason to care about anyone else.

Yes, but we’ve apparently chosen to run our country in such a way.

"we" never got any say in the matter.

By not doing anything to stop it, we agreed to it. No options to stop it were presented, but we weren't limited to the presented options.

Just for cars. Microsoft has been independent in China since the late 90s, although they had to find a partner to do Azure.

> although they had to find a partner to do Azure.

By "finding a partner" you actually mean have Azure-branded services provided by Chinese companies through isolated data centers.

Which kind of proves OPs point.

Do they use the same Microsoft software and the Azure APIs that are available in the rest of the world?

Yes. As for AWS, some of the services are not available in CN. But the APIs are the same for the services that are available.

For some MS software, you need to sign an additional agreement consenting to cross-border transfer of personal data before use. But the features are the same.

Same as AWS ("cn" regions) which often has different rules, especially with cross-region comms.

Same applies to the US gov cloud regions and Apple's iCloud.

Microsoft operated in China for more than a decade before azure was a thing. A lot of companies did, Microsoft is just the one I’m familiar with.

Almost everyone in China pirated Windows and Office. Microsoft were unable to do anything about it, and gave up trying.

Western companies have virtually no IP in China. It gets stolen and IP rights are not enforcible - western companies basically cannot sue Chinese companies. Chinese companies can enforce their IP against western companies, who have to surrender theirs to access the Chinese market. The system is completely rigged in China's favour.

The only way to level that playing field is for western nations to do the same: Let their domestic companies freely steal Chinese IP and selectively enforce IP rights, as China does.

Like in other places, Apple does very well in China, and everyone "pirates" MacOS wait...no they don't. Microsoft made/makes money in China, the piracy came from an outdated software model that eventually went away, and WinDev was going down in flames on revenue worldwide even before that.

> The only way to level that playing field is for western nations to do the same: Let their domestic companies freely steal Chinese IP and selectively enforce IP rights, as China does.

China literally just gives it away for free. They are the top supplier of open source LLMs.